Though each and every Marvel superhero movie has been a critical and financial success, one of the biggest complaints has been the villains. They always seem to be mirror images of which ever superhero is getting his own standalone or spin-off. And most have been kind of lame. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige claims that is all about to change soon.
The MCU officially kicked off Marvel Phase 3 this summer withCaptain America: Civil War, and in an interesting twist, the main villain was each other. Sure Baron Zemo stepped in towards the end to reveal his dastardly plan, and he was one of the firstbad guysnot to be a straight up doppleganger. Soon, Thanos will arrive to wreck havoc on the Marvel movie universe. And it sounds like the days of mirror-villains is almost nearing an end.
Most of the time, in the past Marvel movies, we’ve seen villains that have a very similar skill set, or powers. Iron Monger waged war against Iron Man. Captain America battled Red Skull. And the worst offender of all was when Ant-Man went up against Yellowjacket. But this was all happenstance according to Feige. He explains this toScreen Rant.
“Clearly we will get to that [non-doppelganger match ups]… You want to have characters that inhabit the same world when introducing a new world, anew mythologyfor lack of a better term. You want to explore that as much as you’re able to.”
Feige went onto compare this November’sDoctor Strangevillain to the title character himself. Kaecilius is yet another example of a doppleganger villain. But it’s a necessary trope. He explains this.
“When you’re teaching an audience about sorcerers and that reality and you’re going to talk about the past anyway and you’re going to get into their history anyway, much better to tie-in your bad guy with that instead of laying all this groundwork of parallel dimensions and sorcery and say, by the way, a meteor hit on the other side of the world, it went under the water, and this evil thing developed. What does that have to do with magic? Nothing… That’s not the way we’ve developed them up to this point.”
But don’t worry, soon enough, these belovedMarvel heroeswill be taking on bigger and better threats, with vastly different powers than we’ve ever seen before. Feige goes onto say this.
“Needless to say asmore charactersencounter each other in other films they’re certainly going to be up against things that they don’t know anything about and have no comparable to.”
And that all starts with Thanos inAvengers: Infinity War. It will reportedly take 67 heroes to fight the big purple guy from outer space. And it appears that he will be bringing Marvel’s version of Death with him. That said, a lot of the Marvel charters we know now are going away soon. So we may never see Captain America fight some of his morecolorful foesfrom the comics on the big screen.
